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Portable Music Storage for Your Car?
Randy J. Parker asks: "Why don't cars provide input jacks for devices like MP3 players? My car has spectacular audio quality, but forces me to feed it with a handful of CDs. Unless you have a 'CD Text' supporting CD player and a fairly recent CD from the right company, once the CDs disappear into the changer, they become anonymous numbers: 'Disk 1', 'Disk 2', and so on. Devices like the iPod solve the problem of locating and feeding music, but can't be hitched to the car. Is there an after-market solution that doesn't sacrifice as much fidelity as a crappy cassette emulator or FM near-casting? Are there some cars with input jacks? What mechanisms are available to lobby for audio input jacks? Car manufacturers could even sell detachable storage as part of the car, at a huge margin, just like they do with radios and CD changers. This enables customers to finance the purchase of the portable storage device along with the car, opening up another demographic segment of buyers. I don't really want permanent music storage built into the car, since that would just be another device to synchronize. Ideally, I'd just carry my device, and attach it to speakers at my house, my friend's house, or the car I'm in."
ask your car insurance people about radio theft.
Sometimes you can get coverage for players
by telling them in advance that you use it.
Cheers, Joel
although it probably won't connect to your factory head unit (the radio itself), the the phatnoise music box is an mp3 player that runs linux, supports mp3 and ogg, and connects to many makes of head units through their cd changer controls presenting cd text information to the head unit from id3 tags or filenames. they've since sold the rights to the product to kenwood, who now sell it as the music keg in 10 and 20gb version. the hard drive comes in a removable cartidge, and the system includes a usb docking cradle. the thing looks like a typical car amp, so you just grab the hd from the unit and slap it into the cradle to transfer your songs back and forth.
Don't bother with the cables and charging the batteries and all the rest of the hassle.
Just get an mp3 car unit
I bought a Pioneer DEH-7400MP MP3 CD player and I love it. It was about $300 and had free installation. It's a no-brainer to burn a ton of MP3 music onto a CD-R. I usually use fairly large VBR files and I can fit 100 tracks on a CD no sweat. It has an organic EL display with interesting little canned videos, but of more practical importance, it can display the directory name, file name, ID3 track or artist name in ascii.
I bought it about a year ago. Now the units are getting cheaper. Browse through crutchfield because you can easily see what is available and what it costs. Look under:
Car Audio and Video CD, MP3 & DVD Receivers CD/MP3 Receivers
You can probably get something installed in your car for under $200. You might want to double check that the unit you buy shows the id3 information because some don't.
Oh yeah, if your friend likes the music you're playing, you can just give away the CD and burn another one later.
You may find this surprising, but you can also get the content you described legally, by purchasing it.